Serafina
The message from Matteo arrived with a sharp vibration that startled me mid-sentence as I reviewed council reports. My breath faltered before I even opened it—some part of me already bracing for the weight of whatever he demanded.
When I finally slid my thumb across the screen, the words that appeared twisted something deep inside my chest.
“Meet me tonight. Same conditions. I need answers.”
The insistence in the message—the word need—made my throat tighten with dread. He was getting too close. Too curious. Too desperate. And I, in my reckless attempts to control what could never be controlled, had fed that desperation until it grew teeth.
I should have ignored it. I should have cut ties. I should have chosen safety, logic, my marriage. But the truth was a darker thing—I needed to understand where Matteo’s obsession ended and mine began.
I needed to confront whatever lived in the darkness between us before it consumed me entirely.
The room I chose was nearly pitch-black, lit only by a faint sliver of moonlight bleeding through the boarded window. I had dressed in the same mask, the same wig, the same anonymity that kept me both safe and trapped. My hands trembled as I adjusted the blindfold—the barrier Matteo still believed was mutual. The floor creaked under my shifting weight. Every sound amplified in the suffocating dark.
His voice sliced through the silence the moment he arrived. “You came.” It wasn’t relief or triumph—it was something deeper, something frayed, as though he’d been fighting himself the entire time he walked here.
I forced my modulated voice steady. “This will be brief.”
“I don’t want brief,” he said, stepping closer. The sound of his boots on the old floorboards sent a rush of panic dancing through my veins. “I want the truth. I want to understand why being near you feels like drowning in something I’ve known all my life.”
I inhaled sharply, the modulator turning it into a distorted hum. “You’re romanticizing a stranger.”
“No,” he said, and the conviction in his tone nearly undid me. “No, that’s not what this is. I’ve met strangers. I’ve touched strangers. But you—whatever this is—it’s not new. I feel like I’ve touched you a thousand times before.”
My pulse pounded so loudly I was afraid he might hear it. “You’re imagining things,” I whispered.
“Am I?” His steps grew slower now, cautious, like a predator approaching not prey but revelation. “Every time I close my eyes, I remember the shape of your breath. The way you trembled under my hands. That’s not imagination. That’s memory.”
Cold shot down my spine. “Don’t come any closer.”
He stopped, but only barely. “If you don’t want me closer, why did you come tonight?” The rawness in his voice disarmed me. “Why answer my messages at all? Why agree to meet me like this, in the dark, hiding a truth you refuse to give a name?”
“I didn’t come for you,” I lied quietly, even though we both heard the truth cracking underneath. “I came because I need closure. A last meeting. Nothing more.”
Matteo let out a shaky breath. “Closure doesn’t tremble the way you are right now.”
I flinched at his accuracy. It gave him an opening—and he took it.
He reached out slowly, his fingers brushing my arm—not grabbing, not claiming, just touching with a familiarity that shattered something inside me. My breath caught, and I hated myself for how instinctively my body responded.
He froze.
For a long moment we stood there, suspended between past and present, between truth and deception. Then, in a voice shaken by recognition he could not explain, Matteo murmured, “God… why does this feel exactly like—”
“No,” I whispered sharply, stepping back. “Don’t finish that thought.”
But he continued, pain threading through every word. “—like someone I lost. Someone I failed. Someone I’ve never forgotten.”
The air collapsed around me. My heart beat so violently it hurt.
He reached again, his fingers brushing the line of my jaw with such unbearable tenderness that tears stung my eyes behind the blindfold. “Who are you?” he whispered. “Please. I’m begging you. Tell me who you are.”
Panic surged through me, raw and desperate. I shoved him back harder than I meant to, and he stumbled—not from force but shock. “Stop,” I rasped through the modulator. “Stop asking. Stop guessing. Stop looking for pieces of someone who isn’t here.”
Matteo’s breathing turned unsteady. “You think I don’t know what this is? You think I can’t feel that you’re lying? There’s something in the way you breathe, the way you recoil, the way your voice trembles—there’s something painfully familiar. I’m not imagining this.”
“I said stop,” I snapped, but the modulator made even my anger sound like a stranger’s voice.
He stepped forward again, slowly, cautiously, as though approaching the edge of a cliff. “If you just take off the blindfold—”
“No!” The word ripped out of me, raw and terrified. “If you see me, everything ends. Everything.”
Matteo inhaled deeply, almost brokenly. “Maybe everything needs to end.”
My breath hitched, and for a moment the mask, the blindfold, the darkness, the entire structure of lies I had built trembled toward collapse. He was too close—emotionally, physically, dangerously close to uncovering the truth neither of us was ready for.
I stumbled back, hitting the wall. My voice shook as I whispered, “This meeting is over.”
“No,” he said desperately, reaching out. “Don’t go. You can’t keep doing this. Whoever you are—whatever you’re hiding—it’s killing me not to know.”
I slipped away before he could grasp my arm, my shoulder, my truth. I fled through the narrow door, heartbeat in my throat, lungs burning. Matteo’s voice followed me, echoing into the empty night.
“Come back! Please—just tell me who you are!”
But I didn’t stop. I didn’t look back. I ran until the vineyard estate disappeared behind me and the cold night air bit through my disguise, reminding me of the person I had to return to.
By the time I reached home, my steps were unsteady. I leaned against the front door, pressing a trembling hand to my chest as the weight of what almost happened crashed over me.
I had been seconds—seconds—from letting Matteo recognize me. Seconds from tearing apart every boundary, every life I had built, every lie I had chosen for survival.
I looked up the dark staircase leading to the bedroom I shared with Adrian. My stomach twisted painfully.
How much longer could I keep this from him?
How much longer could I keep this from myself?
Because the truth was suffocating.
I wasn’t afraid Matteo would expose me.
I was afraid…
that a part of me wanted him to.